Jozef Tiso

Jozef Tiso (13 October 1887-18 April 1947) was the President of the First Slovak Republic from 26 March 1939 to 3 April 1945 during World War II. Tiso was a former Roman Catholic priest who became a leader of the Slovak independence movement, and Tiso became the first president of an independent Slovakia in 1939. He was executed for war crimes after the war.

Biography
Jozef Tiso was born on 13 October 1887 in Nagybiccse, Trencsen, in Austria-Hungary (present-day Bytca, Slovakia). He became a priest of the Roman Catholic Church and became a member of parliament of Czechoslovakia in 1920, but he became an activist for the independence of Slovakia. In 1939 he was appointed as President of the First Slovak Republic by Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany after Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, and Tiso was made the leader of a new fascist state. Under Tiso's rule, Slovakia fought the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front of World War II, invaded Poland, and persecuted many Jews. He fled to a Capuchin monastery in Bavaria as the war ended, but he was captured by the US Army and extradited to a Czechoslovak court. He was executed in a botched hanging which suffocated him to death rather than broke his neck.